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DavidGilbert99 writes "A leaked video of the purported Google Chromebook Pixel laptop has stirred quite a lot of interest but whether or not the laptop in the video is real, Google needs to launch it in order to kickstart the Chrome OS platform." A high-res screen would be welcome, but Google seems to be doing alright with Chromebook sales right now. Warning: IB Times has ads with autoplaying videos and sound; you have been warned.

The article doesn't make a particularly good case for why ChromeOS would suddenly become attractive on a high-resolution touchscreen. Especially given that it's built around Google's not-touch-optimised web apps.

I could give half a fuck about the OS that it comes loaded with, particularly since I'll end up wiping it and installing some more conventional Linux distro on day one. I just want an affordable laptop with a high-DPI panel. I don't think it's particularly unreasonable to ask that my laptop panel have a DPI that's on the same order of magnitude as my cellphone.

From what I'm seeing, the problem is that Most Android and iOS devices do not have expandable memory (USB/SD/HCSD/MHCSD) ports and yes I have a Nexus 7 (32gb Nvidia Tegra) and w/o access to external media or the ability to boot the damn things from external you're not going to be able to put anything except what the OS allows on them.

This is one of the biggest reasons I'm seriously looking at a Win Pro tablet. Yes it's a stupid problem but if the only way I can get something that allows me to install an alt

No, you can put whatever OS you want on a Chromebook assuming, like has always been true, the OS supports the hardware.

Ubuntu being the only one to support it isn't Chromebook's fault. Go yell at to support it, or in the spirit of open source, add it yourself. There's nothing particularly special about Chromebook's BIOS.

I seem to remember reading that ChromeOS would load by default and that to boot into, say, Ubuntu one had to hold down some keys on startup and manually select an OS. i.e. it wasn't possible just to automatically load one's preferred OS on startup.

(I know, I'm feeding this obTroll, but hey, it's 3am here, and I'm waiting for a render to complete!) Chromebook is a laptop, not a tablet. And why do you need "external media" to boot (indeed, you seem to think "booting" is something all devices do in the same way.) I'm getting the impression you really don't understand the differences between a laptop and a tablet. Fwiw, my Nexus 10 is a tablet, but it is not "locked down." Unlocking it and reflashing it with cyanogen's excellent mod took all of five

I'm not sure what it accomplishes though, aside from making it more expensive. The overwhelming majority of laptops sold now - Chromebook's target audience - are not high-resolution, and I doubt that high resolution alone would attract people who currently dislike it.

Every now and then I see one of these ChromeOS stories, and it reminds me that ChromeOS exists. I'm not being catty there, I mean that I really do literally forget about it. That's probably not a good sign for Google. It not only hasn't made a big splash, it's barely made ANY splash at all.

I agree... Chromebooks are great for parents:) They just work and tech support is nil.

The one downside is that they're small, which makes them difficult for older people. I'd buy one for my father-in-law in a heartbeat if they were larger; I'm actually considering installing ChromiumOS on the 15" Acer that I gave him last year. Right now it's running Ubuntu in a fairly locked-down configuration, but he still manages to mess it up from time to time (most recently he made the Chrome window larger than the screen and moved it so all the controls were off the screen). If there were a cheap 15" C

It's best for Google if they just quietly sell the things and don't get people too hooked on "ChromeOS". What google really wants to sell is "Chrome". Then one day when Chrome on Android reaches parity with Chrome on PC they can discontinue ChromeOS and play up the fact that Chrome is in their Android-based ChromeOS replacements. It's really not in Google's best interest to maintain so many Linux distributions. ChromeOS has only one reason to exist, Chrome on Android still sucks. It has improved significant

I actually use Firefox on Android, and it WILL run on older hardware. Many standard addons work as well. The biggest problem seems to be that a lot of mobile sites are coded with the assumption that the viewer is using Webkit, so on some sites I wind up having a better experience with the full site than the mobile one.

No, but who is buying these things? Which is sort of the point. They don't fill any particular needs, they don't get any press either here or on regular web sites. I've never actually seen one anywhere. So, the GP is making a point that wherever they're being sold, it probably isn't in the general market. Or the owners aren't taking them outside for use.

I'm wondering if the hardware isn't just being repurposed for other things.

Why would you expect them to be outside? And do you always check what laptop everyone around you is using? My mum's laptop never leaves her house, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or have any uses. My Ultrabook rarely leaves my desk at work, because I already have tablets and a desktop at home. I rarely take either of my tablets outside. My phone does the job just fine then.

They don't fill any particular needs

When tablets first came out everyone (including me) said they don't really fill a particular need. But they are very popular

If they're selling well, you would expect for at least some of them to be taken outside. If you just want something to check email and stuff like that, you're better off buying something that's used.

And yes, the fact that I'm not seeing them is a problem for them. Windows laptop manufacturers can get away with that because Windows is a commonly used OS and they're just competing with other Windows laptop manufacturers. Apple can't as much because they need people to know that they're product is being used.

It's a work machine, so I didn't pay for it. At the time (late 2011) I wanted a machine that I could take home and use to connect in to work and chat to friends when typing on my tablet got annoying. I ended up buying a desktop machine at home for gaming though (had been using consoles for a few years prior), and it takes care of when I need a real keyboard.

Well, you've probably heard of the iPad. I'm pretty sure there are now millions of folk using tablets as their primary computing device.

Some folk have probably noticed the lack of a keyboard can be an issue. For anyone using an android tablet, a chromebook would probably be a pretty decent complement and between the two devices you would have a nice complete package. Everything you work on is automagically on both devices, there's next to no management required. It just w

Chromebooks are actually quite good for newbs. As long as they have "one of us" to set it up, connect to their wireless (home or public), they are absolutely perfect for people who use computers for nothing for than web browsing, facebooking and email. The price point works for lower income users, and there is a growing movement to bring them into public/community service like libraries and schools. That's probably where the majority of sales are coming from.

I work in K-12 education. We are considering a large deployment in our 5-12 student space. Rationale is as follows: --District already has "free" Google Apps for EDU; chromeOS 'just works' in this environment
--Hardware is mostly low maintenance
--Devices are at least as durable as ipads and similar devices
--Devices cost same or less than laptops, ipads, etc
--Devices have keyboards and so will be more useful for testing
--Google is a sturdy enough organization t

It's the top selling laptop on both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk right now. You've heard of Amazon, right? You know, the number 1 online retailer. Just how much more do you need before you define something as "popular", Mr Snarky?

I am calling bullshit on that number one thing I think it's outright fake. I think they are paying Amazon for that to make it appear popular I don't think it's real. I work in IT everyone I know is seriously in to technology and gadgets and I have seen zero of these in the wild anywhere and no one I know is talking about them at all. I think this is all a bullshit PR campaign thought up by an ad agency in fact the suspicious number of slashdot stories around the chrome book makes me think they are getting p

Which is fine if you're a yank or a pom. Amazon is often more expensive than other book retailers since, last I checked, they charge for international shipping. Nor did they even process overseas orders for electronics.

Well, I'm not trying to be snarky, but my definition of "popular" is seeing one of these beasts in the wild. It's yet to happen.

Are you sure you haven't? The Acer doesn't look much different from a typical netbook, and the new Samsung looks a lot like a MacBook Air. There are a lot of both (Airs and Chromebooks) around my office (I work for Google) and it takes more than a quick glance to distinguish them if you can't see the Apple logo.

I did actually wonder about the returns thing, but for people that actually read the reviews, they can see that it won't run Windows applications etc. As long as it does Flash it's fine (though apparently there are problems with the ARM build of Flash on it right now).

Haha, no I don't work for Amazon, and I wouldn't want to. Jeff Bezos sounds like an awful boss. I do however think they provide really good service, and use them almost exclusively for buying stuff online (occasionally I'll check play.com too for blu-rays, since they sometimes beat out Amazon).

I often feel like I'm sitting in a hole when it comes to new laptops, netbooks and phones. I usually only pay attention to that stuff when I actually need a new one my

Not true, you can do offline tasks like responding to email or writing documents without an internet connection. It will simply re-sync next time you are online, much like a phone.

Chromebooks are popular because people want a simple laptop that "just works" and has all the services they use (browsing, Skype, document editing, email). No anti-virus to worry about, low cost, good hardware and long battery life. They are what Netbooks should have been, except that they shipped with Windows XP or a terrible cus

While it may have had good sales during the Christmas shopping season, I'd like to know the return rate after people found out it was not a $150 laptop but a internet dependent device. I know people that returned Kindle Fire units when they found it was more of a sales portal for Amazon than an actual tablet. I know people that bought e-book readers when they did not even have WiFi in the home... Damn... I need to meet smarter people... But my point is most of the sales are made to people that don't actuall

I have a Chromebook and it's really great! My girlfriend also has one, and I use ssh to log into my servers and do work, and she uses online applications like sharelatex.com and the browser-versions of Geogebra to write worksheets for her math students.

More and more of our work can be done just as easily in a browser as not, and less and less requires a desktop or a "fully-functional" laptop. Really the only thing I have a desktop for is games and running resource-intensive programs.

Why do videos like this generate so much interest? It's just another laptop. Looks like every laptop that came before it. Throw in a touchscreen, whatever. It's still just a big hinged rectangle. Nothing new here.

I always thought that Android was more of a project by Google just to make sure Apple has some competition in the market. Android was extremely sh*tty for a long time. Over time Android is no longer going to be supported by Google. I think Google does not care so much about open source. Its main goal is to gravitate people towards Linux-like OSes and ultimately make them use Chrome OS. That is the OS that they are going to put their heart and soul in. Think about it, whatever category you put Chrome OS in -

Android was the product of an "Oh $#!+" moment when Google realized the world was migrating to mobile access of the internet, and they had no presence in that space. They did not want to be beholden to Apple for access to their mobile user-base. Google's effort in the mobile space is to generate a user-base more or less locked into Google's family of services. They're much more able to get their fingers into a platform that they control, and are thus better able to monetize the user-base's interaction with

Google doesn't need new hardware for Chrome OS. They just need more marketing, because they're already doing well.

Imagine for a moment that you're a small business, such as a plumbing company. You don't have a full-time IT staff. You have maybe 10-30 computers.

You're probably buying your PCs retail. Then you have to buy a Windows server, and pay someone to set it up. You buy CALs for users and computers. A second back-up server is probably out of your budget. Off-site data back-ups are probably out of the question.

Who administers your network to keep it safe and secure? How to do you prevent malware and viruses? Administer your email?

You pay a bunch upfront, and then never know when you need to bring in an IT company to fix things. Your IT budget is completely unknown.

Or, you get Chromebooks. Google used to offer packages to lease them for $25/$30 a month. Not sure if they still do, but you can get them for $250 if not. You don't have to have your own server, unless you need Citrix for proprietary Windows apps. Your data is in the cloud. You don't have to run a mail server. Anyone can sit at any PC and instantly have their work. You don't pay an IT staff. You can budget easily for IT costs.

Arr... but the hardware's the only appealing part of this. Google has been great for hardware with their Nexus line, providing some really excellent devices at really good prices. This laptop would probably cost around half of what Apple charges (based on the price differentiation that they've managed with iDevices) for hardware that's at least as good. Put SUSE on it (or the flavor of your choice) and you have something really great.

I think Google invented GMail, Calendar, and even Chromebooks for its own employees, to simplify its own IT and also to lean less on competitors like Microsoft.

Now that they can sell it to the rest of the world, great, but if those products never made any money, they still would be saving Google money or at least headaches. My company uses Microsoft Office and I daily envy users of Google Apps for email, chat, etc.

I suspect the OP's comment is a combination of wishful thinking combined with misreading headlines. What is true is that:

1. The ChromeBook is doing well on Amazon. The fact it's topping the list of laptops shouldn't be seen as meaning that ChromeBooks in general are doing better than Windows 8 laptops because there are many, many, of the latter, and very few of the former.

2. Acer is saying that their ChromeBook is selling better than their Windows 8 machines. Again, that has to be balanced by context,

1) Amazon doesn't really reflect anything in the broader market. For example, in the past Nokia Lumia windows phones were leading Amazon. Also, being the bestseller is way different from outselling others.2) Acer did not say anything even close to that. 5% of 10% of their Acer sales is nowhere close to "Chromebooks are outselling Windows 8 PCs" Please stop making up things.3)Yes, it takes a few weeks to manufacture and put a new OS model on shelves. Really?

Sure, the high res screen would be nice. If I could ask for a single upgrade for my Samsung Chromebook, that would be it.. But the last few Chromebooks released have been disappointing to me, and I'm skeptical that this would be any better.

I'd say Samsung got it right with the Exynos CPU, and ChromeOS runs very, very well on ARM. Between my home and business we've replaced 3 laptops with Chromebooks, but it seems like the Samsung model is the only one that I would even consider. If you want a cheap feeling, heavy, loud, low battery life laptop, there's plenty of those to choose from. If you want something that runs cool, runs for long time, doesn't annoy you with fans, and doesn't burn your lap, then the Samsung is your only pick.

Google, if you want to release a "powerhouse" chromebook, try the Exynos quad core, and throw in some more memory. Exynos supports 40 bit memory addressing, so the 4G barrier doesn't really exist in a practical sense (32 bit address space exposed to each processes, chrome is multi-process).

I've been seriously considering getting a Chromebook as a second general purpose device for my wife. She's always on my home desktop doing facebook, gmail, pinterest, etc. I also have an iPad, and the number one thing I like about it is the high resolution. I use it mostly for reading, maybe a game now and then, and it's hard to go back to reading text on a regular computer screen after using it for a while. I think a higher res screen would be great.

If you're leaving it as ChromeOS, you'll regret buying the Acer. Its a lot heavier, requires active cooling, and the battery life is ass. Basically, its a cheap x86 laptop, with the normal issues of a cheap x86 laptop. The little bit of speed you pick up will pale in comparison to how much nicer the Samsung is to use in the real world. She won't notice that Facebook loads.001 seconds quicker, but she will notice her lap getting warm, the fan running constantly, and having to take her power cord with her ev

I installed a Chrome OS VM just yesterday to see what all the fuss was about.

It seems nice enough to surf and use web apps. I haven't really tried offline yet, but if they say it works, it probably does.

Were it does come apart is in any old-school scenario: I could find no way to access my network shares, to play non-local media content (except running a web server and presenting the content as Flash or HTML5), no DLNA client nor server.

I don't really see how Chrome OS is superior to Android. Is there anything Chrome OS does that Android doesn't ? 'coz there's sure plenty that Android does but Chrome OS doesn't !

You do need to expose your shares as HTTP, but you probably don't need to wrap them in a flash player. The built-in media player supports several formats, h264 included. I use FreeNAS as my file server and a few minutes with that got me a nice web accessible, directory-indexed media share. It isn't perfect but it does the job with minimal fuss.

And what Chromebooks can do that tablets can't do: Replace traditional laptops. You can actually do real work with these things.

Android is a mess based on Java that their acquired from another company.ChromeOS is an innovative operative system built by the research division at Google, using the same technology as Google Chrome, the world's most popular web browser.

If you read through the recent/. discussion about MS Surface, many (myself included) like the concept of one device that functions as a tablet AND a netbook but aren't sold on MS' vision because of(a) Complaints about the kickstand and robustness(b) Heat and noise from using a Core i5 instead of an ARM/Atom(c) Price(d) Queasiness about Windows 8 and the metro interface.

If Google came out with a Asus Transformer clone in place of Chromebooks, these would sell arguably *better* than a neutered version of Gen

I'm sure I'm not the person they want to sell to but last time looked it offered nothing for doing development. Excluding that they live in a magical world where you always have a net connection. Even in a well connected city that's not always the case. I'll stick with OS X or Linux which does everything chrome os does and more.

This device looks great, with the sweet screen, that means there is a need for a decent CPU + GPU combination, also hopefully it means that this device will support more, and hopefully higher speed memory. Up to 8 gigs of Ram, a great touch-enabled screen, a moderately powerful CPU + GPU, an SSD, backlit keyboard, and very stylish look and size, sign me up! If Google can squeeze some good battery life out of this machine, between 4-6 hours, this product will be a slam dunk. Everyone arguing about ChromeO